Formalizando interação visual com bancos de dados históricos.

Abstract

Recent database applications are typically oriented towards a large set of non-expert users, and therefore, they need to be equipped with suitable interfaces facilitating the interaction with the system. Moreover, the incorporation of time in database systems is a desirable feature. Indeed, severals temporal data models and the corresponding textual query languages have been proposed. However, there is a limited amount of research concerning the investigation of user-oriented languages for querying temporal databases. Our proposal addresses such a need. In particular, we propose a visual query environment, namely TVQE (Temporal Visual Query Environment), which provides an easier interaction of the user with temporal databases. The system adopts a diagrammatic representation of the database schema (including temporal classes and relationships) and a "graphical notebook" as interaction metaphor. In our approach, non-database experts are released from syntactical difficulties which are typical of textual languages, and they can easily express temporal queries by means of elementary graphical operations (e.g. click on a node label). Differently from many proposals in the field of visual query languages, the language underlying TVQE is provided w i t h formal syntax and semantics. It is based on a minimal set of temporal graphical primitives (TGPs), which are defined on a Temporal Graph Model (TGM), with visual syntax and object-based semantics. We mainly concentrate on the formal aspects of TVQE, and provide some ideas on the visual interaction mechanisms and implementation issues.